One of my favorite authors of all times, Terry Pratchett (author of the Discworld books), has some bad news.
Read his letter here.

Summary: Has been diagnosed with early onset alzheimer, but isn’t dead yet…

The letter, even though it’s sad, makes me chuckle a little, he’s such a good writer! And funny!

For me personally the Discworld books has a very special place in my history. The first time I spoke to my sweetie it was because he was reading Witches abroad, I commented on his excellent choice of reading material and we started talking (also called praising pratchett). That’s two and half years ago and we’re still together. The Discworld books are excellent in that respect, if someone likes the books and reads all of them as soon as they get their grubby little hands on them, they are usually worth keeping. Those that read one book and dosen’t get it… or even worse, those that don’t even want to try… let’s just call them wankers.

So, don’t be a wanker, go and read some excellent books today!

If you’re on Ravelry I also recomend checking out the Ankh Morpork knitters group.

Tags: Books, discworld, satire

Let’s start out with some facts; in the last seventeen years consumption in Norway has increased with 36%. We are not atypical in that respect, it’s actually below the rate a lot of other countries we should compare ourselves too. But it’s not good.
The main reason this increasment has happened is the access to cheap stuff, from places like H&M, Ikea and Rema 1000 (grocery store).

Everybody should know by now that this is one of the big problems the world has, we exploit other countries for their goods (making the rich richer and the poor… well, starving). We buy shitty toys painted with poison made in slave labor just because they are soooo cheap and enslave animals for food purposes.

Because everyone knows this most companies with decent marketing strategists figure out ways to make our consumption guilt free, or even something we see as a duty.

Ikea has started a campaign where they give 1 euro to UNICEF for every plush toy you buy from them for about two months.
This makes people think that they are doing something good purchasing these products.
Ok, why do I think this is bad?
Because I was at Ikea today (buying stuff for making this years Yule gifts), and I saw people walking up to the stand, reading the info, and then picking up a toy they hadn’t intended to buy in the first place!
The UNICEF booth had no info about how to donate without purchasing, this gives the impression that all you can do is buy something, and everything will be better.
WTF?

The toy costs 100kr = 12.45 euro
if we say that the production cost is half of this (I think it’s smaller), and we remove 2 euro for shipping and handeling, Ikea still makes about 4 euro pr toy.
They give one fourth of this to charity. They still make money off the toy, but more money since more people are buying them!

And as a marketing campaign this is really clever, people will buy more at Ikea because they know that Ikea gives some of their income to charity.

Unless I’m very much mistaken, UNICEF gets some out of this, the consumers get more shit in their home they didn’t really need in the first place, the enviorment gets more messed up with every shipment of toys across the globe and the ultimate winner is… Ikea!

The moral of todays post: Don’t buy shit you don’t need, donate the money instead.

I’m writing a small thing on poverty in Norway for a class I’m taking. One of the richest countries in the world and our poverty problem (and since I’m going to become a librarian, why a library is so important for poor people).

The thing I have a hard time wrapping my head around is the numbers I find.
We have no poverty of the kind you find in some countries, no people living on less than a dollar each day. That is almost the only data that is completely reliable.
Everything else is numbers where they put the parameters for the numbers such that it makes no sense.

You don’t have a car = poor
You can’t eat meat/fish every other day = poor
unless you happen to be a student, or on a social welfare program, then you are automatically excluded from the statistics

After doing a bit of searching I found that about 11% of the population is what the EU would call poor. That translates to about 8600kr a month for a person living in a couple and 11 600kr for someone living alone.

But, no… The eleven percent is the people that were poor for the span of a full year. At any given point about 1/5 of the population has less than the required amount of cash.

The numbers in cash seems pretty large, and probably are. But not if you consider the fact that Norway actually is the most expensive country in the world to live in. I’m spot on the EU requirement for being poor, and I spend 1/10 of my income each month just to be able to take the train to school (and that’s with a discount!)

What I found is basically that we have no real numbers for how many poor people there are, and no one has bothered getting accurate numbers for how many homeless there are. Somewhere between 7 000 and 30 000 is all the government knows…

I don’t really think they care. While searching for something I cite for this little hand-in I found a lot of crap… ALOT of it. Like the fact that my own government actually thinks that a person should be able to live on 37kr a day, the only thing not included is rent. That is enough to buy a bread and a couple of oranges. But you would have to do without toilet paper… This has everything to do with the fact that the social welfare rates are about the same now as they were 15 years ago.

Oh, and the 1/5 part of the population with a lot of cash is not surprisingly getting a lot richer..

If we keep up this way we might actually be able to shake off all our socialist influence in due time.
(I’m just very angry right now, very, very angry)

Tags: norway, oslo, poverty

(Links in italics will be to Danish/Norwegian sites, but as the video footage on this pages are very good, I still recommend that you check them out)

Saturday 6th of October there was another fight in Denmark.

A group of radical youths (between 3000-6000 people, the police gives the lowest number, the news stations say 4-5000 and other sources says 5-6000) held a peaceful demonstration. One bottle was smashed, and others immediately told off the person responsible for this in the march.
As this was a peaceful march several children were present.

The police on the other hand showed up in complete riot outfit, batons, dogs and large amount of teargas. All of this was used at the slightest provocation.

Read the blow by blow account here in english/danish.

I think this is terrible, all they wanted was to get a fucking house! The house is large, owned by the state and has not been in use for 13 years.

This a part of a longer fight the youth house has had going on, G13 is the new name for the people that used the old building harboured. I think we’re going to hear more from them…

Tags: activists, demonstration

The new knitty is up!
And, it has the sollution to my problem of finding a hoodie pattern with Roam.

Let me say it like mutts does: Yesh!

(Neiman got my attention as well)